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Comment by djd | Hacker News Reader

Any one being cynical about Coursera is definitely having a perspective of the traditional college/school structure, i.e assignments, exams and grades equals knowledge. That need not be true, because any one would be enrolling in the courses just to get their curiosity fueled and gain some knowledge which or else they would have absolutely no access to. I have been enrolling in at least two courses a month and i make a point to finish all the lectures and understand them before enrolling for more, but i have had no time to actually do the assignments and take the quizzes. Ill not get a certificate of completion i.e iam a drop out, but i have access to knowledge and i free to choose what i want to learn.

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Some of the cynicism around Coursera (and Udacity) isn't around the way the education is delivered, but the business model.

Both Coursera and Udacity are for-profit businesses, and both have yet to reveal (or decide) how they want to make that profit. Many current for-profit providers of education are not particularly well respected (University of Phoenix, Kaplan, etc). Some non-profit universities are understandable a little hesitant to work with Coursera and Udacity without a better understanding of how exactly they propose to make money (both have many suggestions, but nothing concrete as of yet).

This cynicism is one reason why some universities have decided to "go it alone" (MIT/Harvard/Berkeley being the most notable with edX).

To be clear, I'm not saying this is my viewpoint: I think very highly of both Coursera and Udacity. I just wanted to point out that some of the cynicism stems not from the idea of open access to teaching and knowledge, but from the worries over working with for-profit companies to achieve that aim.

My guess is that they're running it free as a sort of massive beta test, once they've got the format sorted they'll start including paying courses - quite possibly as follow up to free ones (for example Scala I is free, Scala II costs you money).

And, personally, I'm very grateful to them for hosting such excellent free courses at the moment - the quality has generally been pretty high on the ones I've done, and the format is excellent. If they start making money off it, good for them.

I wonder if it's part of a strategy of creating a huge userbase and alot of content and data all of which will help you lead the field in the future(and be the most profitable). And nothing helps more to create this sorts of things than "free".

I'd more likely expect all the content to be free, but course completion certifications to cost money.

Edit: This would be particularly useful if the certifications were convertible into course credit at participating universities.

How would that work online? Cheating is already a problem - there's nothing to stop you googling for the answer to a given assignment, or getting your clever best friend to help you out.

My own experience with watching lectures is that I feel I understand everything as I listen to them, but once a week passes I have trouble explaining anything but the basic gist of what I learned. My experience with assignments is that they force me to acknowledge just how incomplete my understanding of what I learned was. With programming in particular, I feel like lectures are an important framework that help guide your learning, but that most of the actual learning takes place in the assignments.

come to think of it I should really give a shot at the assignments and see how better i retain knowledge

I am taking the scala course and I find assignments very interesting, they have also developed a cool task in sbt ( scala ) to submit the assignments from sbt console itself , they are also focusing on writing unit tests from the first program.

sbt has been around a lot longer than the course, it hasn't been developed specifically for coursera.

I think the parent is saying it's a new task within sbt for submitting homework, not that sbt itself is new.

Possibly, hadn't read it that way. (And if that's the case, my apologies.)

I understand your point of view: just watching the lectures offers an interesting high level overview.

However, the weekly quizzes offer a great learning experience. After watching the lectures for a week, keep taking the quiz over and over again until you really understand the material. Each time you take a quiz you get (mostly) different questions.

For some of the classes you also get a lot of additional material in the homework assignments.

thank you i will give it a shot :)

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